We are looking for a new Head of Postgraduate Programme for ’The History of Design and Material Culture.’ Taught in conjunction with the Royal College of Art, this is the preeminent programme in the field and it is growing in connection with exciting developments at both Museum and College. Reporting to the Director of Research and Collections and working closely with the Head of Programme at the Royal College of Art, the new Head will provide leadership for teaching and learning, research, and management of the resources of the programme and staff.

Infrastructure has always had a privileged relationship to both expertise and the public in modern government. But in the early 21st century, this relationship is inflected in novel ways. The purposes public infrastructure was meant to serve—welfare, quality of life, economic development, and so on—persist. But they are often conceptualized differently, promoted by different agencies, and articulated through novel technological and collective relations. This issue of Limn explores new formations of infrastructure, publicness, and expertise.The contributions examine how new forms of expertise conceive the public and make claims in its name, how publics are making novel claims on experts (and claims to expertise), and how earlier norms and techniques of infrastructure provisioning are being adapted in the process.…

Every day this week, Radio Four will air “Objects of Desire” at 12.04, which explores some of the main concerns of Material Culture Studies:

This is the story of how the things we accumulate around us say more than we might imagine about who we are.

“The fate of the object,” said the French thinker Jean Baudrillard, “has been claimed by no-one.” Unless, of course, the object in question is the Mona Lisa or the Albert Jewel. In these programmes, Matthew Sweet will be looking at the other stuff. The cups. The spoons. The knick-knacks. The things we might keep, even if we don’t quite have the room for them.

Through the prism of what people have in their homes, Objects of Desire explores the work of sociologists and anthropologists like Pierre Bourdieu and Mary Douglas, and philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in order to understand the curious mixture of display, memory, emotion and chance that informs the objects we surround ourselves with.

Bard Graduate Center invites scholars from university, museum, and independent backgrounds with a PhD or equivalent professional experience to apply for funded research fellowships, to be held during the 2017–18 academic year. The theme for this period is “What is distance?” Applicants are asked to address in a cover letter how their projected work will bear on this question. The fellowships are intended to fund collections-based research at Bard Graduate Center or elsewhere in New York, as well as writing or reading projects in which being part of our dynamic research environment is intellectually valuable. Eligible disciplines and fields of study include—but are not limited to—art history, architecture and design history, economic and cultural history, history of technology, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology.…

The Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio University invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor of Anthropology in cultural anthropology with specialization in visual and media anthropology. Geographical area is open. Ideal candidates will conduct research that is theoretically and ethnographically innovative and will be committed to excellence in undergraduate teaching. The successful candidate will be expected to teach upper-level courses in Ethnographic Methods and Anthropological Theory and their areas of expertise, as well as Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. The successful candidate will be expected to develop and strengthen program resources and opportunities relating to museum studies, including building connections with museum programs and institutions on campus and in the community. The position start date will be August 2017.…

Beginning after November reading week, the series will use insights from social anthropology, material culture studies, medical anthropology and biological anthropology to explore and critique peoples’ resilience in the face of social and/or ecological difficulty in a range of ethnographic settings.

The seminars will run from 11-1pm in the department and are open to students, academics and the public. For more information follow the link below:

Anthropology & Photography (ISSN 2397-1754) is a new open-access RAI publication series edited by the RAI Photography Committee. Emerging from the international conference of the same name organized by the RAI at the British Museum in 2014, the series will highlight and make available to the widest possible audience the best new work in the field.

We are eager to solicit new contributions from anthropologists and practitioners which could be visual, textual, or somewhere in between.

Guidelines for submission:

Texts should be on average 4-6,000 words, normally with anything up to 30 images. We are interested in the intersections of text and image, and the capacities of the visual to convey anthropological ideas or participate in anthropological debates. We are also interested in supporting publications that are primarily visually based and are interested in the potential of the anthropological photo-essay or extended documentary project.…

If you know how to fabricate a candle from fat or a pen from a fishbone, you can survive in prison. If you know how blood reacts to lemon juice, you can remove stains. If you know why polylactide is more sustainable than polyethylene, you can change the world.

Today, knowledge about materials, their origins, and processing is more valued and desired than ever before. At the same time, such knowledge is specialized, concealed, and the domain of experts.

International Symposium at the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS), LMU Munich, 9–11 February 2017

Convened by

PHILIPP SCHORCH AND MARTIN SAXER

Call for Papers Deadline: 31 October 2016

This symposium aims at collectively thinking through connectivity and materiality. Our starting point is simple: things that move and thereby connect or, the other way round, connections made through things are central to anthropology’s concerns. From the Kula Ring to the journeys of museum objects, from the travels of empire-founding Buddha statues to the logics and logistics of shipping containers, connectivity and materiality are interwoven in various but particular ways. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, we take connectivity and materiality not as defined properties of some-thing but as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or rather is becoming, in a world.…